Field of the Invention and Related Art Statement
This invention relates to an apparatus for controlling the transportation of cured tires in a tire manufacturing factory and more particularly to a method of identifying cured tires transported on a tire feeding path after curing machines without detecting tire identification information from the tires.
In the tire manufacturing process, cured tires are subjected to a finishing process and a checking process. In this case, it is required to detect the cured tires transported on a feeding line and direct respective cured tires to given finishing stages and checking stages. To this end, tire identification information such as kinds, outer appearance, dimensions and shapes of tires are detected from the tire itself. The tire identification information may be detected by various methods. For instance, the outer appearance of tire is detected by detecting tread pattern, identification line, limb diameter, width and outer diameter of tire. It is also known to enter manually the tire identification information which is detected by an operator watching the tire.
The above mentioned tire identification information detecting methods have drawbacks which will be explained hereinafter.
The tire diameter or tire width is detected by a pair of photoelectric switches arranged along a tire transporting path by interposing a predetermined distance therebetween. In this case, it is only determined whether a diameter or width of a tire is larger than the predetermined distant or not. Therefore, by means of such a method, it is possible to distinguish only a few kinds of tires, and thus the known method could not comply with the recent needs in which many kinds of tires are required to be processed.
In the method of identifying the tires in accordance with the limb diameter, the limb diameter is measured with the aid of a photosensor. However, there are many different kinds of tires having the same limb diameter, and these tires could not be distinguished from each other.
In the method of identifying the tire by taking an image of a tread pattern of the tire by means of a television camera and by processing an image signal supplied from the television camera, an image of the crown portion of the tire is picked up by the television camera and the tire is identified by the so-called pattern recognition. However, this method has drawbacks that the pattern could not be recognized accurately and the processing speed is low. Moreover, different kinds of tires may have the same solid pattern and such tires could be no more classified.
In the method of classifying tires by reading out color lines recorded on the crown portion of the cured tire with the aid of a color sensor, color and thickness of lines and distance between lines may be utilized as judgement standards. However, the color lines could not be recorded on the tire accurately, and hue of color and thickness and position of color lines on the tire might be fluctuate. Therefore, the tire identification information could not be recorded on the tire in an accurate manner. Further, the speed of processing is rather slow.
As explained above in detail, in the known methods of detecting the tire identification information, the detection accuracy is low, the detection speed is slow, and a sufficient amount of information could not be obtained. Particularly, a variety of needs for tires has manifested, and tires having the same dimension, appearance and tread pattern have to be finished differently from each other. That is to say, in the final finishing process, shoulders of tires have to be subjected to different final finishing processes. In such a case, it is almost impossible to control the transportation of the cured tires by means of the tire identification information detected from the tires themselves.